Gatac

  Getting out of the house wasn't Anne's problem. Getting to another house, that was the trick. Even given the season, only a jolly old white man could have pulled off walking down this street with a sack slung over his shoulder, but Anne was bck and wearing clothes in colors decent people didn't even have words for, colors from somewhere in the terra nullius between neon and pastel. Anne figured she essentially had two workable pns to choose from: one was to stick to the backlots and yards, doing her best to stay out of sight and off the main streets. The pn carried a nonzero chance of being seen by someone still at home, like Berkovitz's nosy neighbor, but then again maybe it was an acceptable risk given the short distance she had to cover on foot. She would be crossing less than two dozen lots between her and Oriental Boulevard to the south, where she'd catch the B1 to Fort Hamilton, R7 across the Narrows (no, wait, S53 — it was hard to get the old numbers out of her head) and be on home turf from there. Or maybe just catch a cab at Oriental, but the bus was a decent enough alternative. It all came down to getting to Oriental, though, and if not through the backyards, where she might face fences she couldn't climb in her current state, then on the main street with, well, the other pn.

  The other pn: slump her shoulders, drag the sack next to her feet and take an intense interest in passing trash cans. Let people see what they would only be too happy to ignore.

  It was the pn Anne picked, and she hated herself for it with every half-dragged step. Hated that it forced her to go slow instead of getting the heck out of the search radius for the police manhunt. Hated that she was pying another thankless role, just a song and dance away from a minstrel show. Hated that she kept the act going all the way down to the Boulevard and nobody even gave her a second look. She went past their wns and their little white fences. A couple of pedestrians crossed the street rather than get close to her. This was her design in action, she was pulling the wool over their eyes, she was in control of this — always in control. Wasn't she? The winter threw another yer of cold air at her, cutting straight through the thin fabric, and she felt herself shrink smaller, drawing in her arms in a futile attempt to create warmth and security. Her body was crying, but she used it. Made them more uncomfortable, made them keep their distance. That's what it was. That’s all it was. All part of the pn. That's what she told herself, and by the time she reached the bus stop, she almost believed it.

  She wiped her eyes with her left sleeve and tried to steady her breath while she stood, alone, at the bus stop. Again, two options, and staying here going to pieces wasn't one of them. Two options. The bus or a taxi. Taxi was faster and she'd only have to deal with the driver's attention, but she'd definitely have it — could she come up with a story for why a vagrant at a bus stop would splurge on a taxi and have the fresh bills to pay for it, too? Well, she supposed the bills weren't looking so fresh anymore, what with the swim, but it was still suspicious. What if even getting into the taxi provoked an argument, people passing by might see. On the flipside, she was guaranteed more witnesses in a bus, but people like her — no, back up, people who looked like her, like she happened to look right then and there, they took the bus. This was acceptable. Nothing anyone needed to remember. Still, what about the bag? In a taxi, Anne could just dump it in the trunk, out of sight out of mind. She had nowhere to hide it in the bus. What if someone remembered her because of it? What if someone grabbed it from her and took off at a stop? What if cops stopped the bus, came on and made her open it? Sure, she had wrapped her weapons in her clothes and yered Sean's on top, making sure nothing could be seen shining through the bag or even printing its shape on the taut outside, but it wouldn't withstand a proper search, and there was the damp seawater in it, would the smell get people to notice her on a longer ride —

  Then the bus pulled to a stop next to her and Anne had to make her choice. She looked up, and in doing so, straightened up, lifted the bag off the sidewalk and stepped up to the bus's front entrance, digging into her pants pocket for a bill. Anne felt a little tension dissipate when she saw the bus driver, an older bck woman with permed hair in prim and proper uniform, her eyes firmly on the boulevard ahead and the side mirrors. Anne handed over a dolr bill, then made her way further into the bus, choosing a single seat just in front of the middle exit. She slid the bag under the seat and squeezed it in pce with her legs, folding her arms in front of her chest and looking out of the window as the bus made its way west.

  “Peccantem me quotidie, et non poenitentem, timor mortis conturbat me,” she mumbled to herself; partly to drown out whatever else went on it her head, partly because she felt it was warranted. “Quia in inferno nul est redemptio.”1For a while there in the Middle Ages, ‘timor mortis conturbat me’ was a pretty popur phrase to throw into your poetry. Anne is quoting the source of the phrase, the Office of the Dead. Roughly:Every day I sin and do not repentI am scared to death of dyingBecause there is no redemption in Hell

  She looked out of the window next to her, watching Oriental Boulevard fly past her and struggling with the seat for a more comfortable position. The tenderness in her left side matched the pain in her back. She allowed her hand to touch the injury, tracing her ribs and finding them still in pce. Probably bruised one or two in the scuffle, though, better have Dolr check it out just to be sure. And at some point, she'd have to stop thinking about herself and start thinking about other people. Alexander and Viktor were looking for her right now, as was Nikoi, and she wasn't sure anymore whether their intentions for her were appreciably different, not after this little stunt. And Sean had made his position all too clear. He was a giant walking liability and she could conceive of no better reason for sparing him back there than the difficulty of dealing with the resulting mess. No, she had to go to ground, recover, restock and reassess the overall situation — with everyone she was close to getting upgraded from ‘people’ to ‘threats’. It was easier on her this way. Whatever her difficulties with people were, Anne was very good at dealing with threats.

  Miserere mei, Deus, et salva me.2And this finishes the quote:Take pity on me, oh Lord, and save me.

  Anne felt worse by the time she got off the bus at Fort Hamilton, but to make up for it she told herself she was in the clear now, out of the search area where the cops would be looking for their suspects. To be perfectly truthful, even getting up from her seat had cost her some willpower and now she felt like standing and walking and sitting down were all just different sides of the same coin, painwise. The thought of a coin with three sides produced enough of a smirk in her that she managed to ride the crest of mirth for almost the entire distance to a cluster of pay phones, staggering the st few steps as she cimed one for herself. Her right arm wasn't hurt — at least she didn't have any good expnation for how it could have gotten hurt, and what couldn't have happened clearly didn't happen — but nevertheless she couldn't maneuver it to get at the change in her pants pocket, so she awkwardly reached across with her left hand and felt around in the pocket for a couple of coins. The day was getting better and better. Grimacing the whole time but not granting the world the satisfaction of a pained gasp, she dropped two coins in the slot on the payphone and punched in a number she would still be able to dial from muscle memory a few hours after her clinical death.

  “Hotel Superior, front desk,” Mikhail said on the other end.“Mikhail,” Anne coughed. “Eta ya.”“Annichka?” Mikhail asked. “Are you alright?”“Been better,” Anne said. “Still in one piece, though.”“That's good,” Mikhail said.“I suppose it is,” Anne said.“Where are you?” Mikhail said.Anne looked around. Everything seemed farther away than she remembered and she couldn’t quite read the expressions of the people walking past her. “…in a safe pce,” she said.“That's good,” Mikhail said. “That's good, Annie. You stay safe.”

  Anne hung up. Her right arm obeyed her enough that it moved toward the metal enclosure of the payphone to steady her. Deep breaths were painful, but necessary. More coins found their way into the phone. If not by hook, she thought, then by crook, dialing another number to another front desk. It rang twice, not nearly enough time to figure out what she was going to say.

  “Reid Financial Services,” the receptionist said. “How may I direct your call?”“This is Simmons,” she said. “I need to speak to Mr. Reid.”“…certainly,” the receptionist answered. “Please hold.”

  Anne chanced a look to the side. Was there a more paranoid look than hunched next to a payphone with the pstic handset pressed against the side of her face? She tried to focus her eyes and her thoughts. Where to now? The safehouse was out and with that, Dolr’s clinic as well. That narrowed it down to —

  “Miss Simmons,” Sebastian said on the other end of the line. “I was waiting for this call. Waiting since yesterday. Perhaps you have an expnation.”“I do,” Anne said. Home, she thought. Bus ride there, bus ride back, add a safety buffer. “Pick me up at the Pigeon Park3The old popur name for what is now known as the Fort Hamilton Pza. at 5. We can discuss everything on the way.”“The way where?” Sebastian asked.“…I will tell you then,” Anne said.

  Silence. Anne breathed against the pain. Lord, if she could just count one man still on her side —

  “Good,” Sebastian said. “I will see you then and there. Goodbye, Miss Simmons.”“Goodbye,” Anne said.

  “What the hell was that?” Nikoi screamed, loud enough to make Mikhail flinch.

  Mikhail didn’t have a lot of room to flinch into. Indeed, his little compartment barely had any room behind the desk, but there were four men in it: Mikhail, who was still clutching the telephone’s receiver but slowly rolling into the farthest corner of the compartment, Viktor, who looked rather ashamed of his part in this, Alexander, who had to be there but dearly wished he wasn't, and Nikoi, whose capacity for going from utter silence to screaming in a heartbeat was a remarkable talent.

  “You told me your dog would call in if she was still alive,” Nikoi continued, “and you keep me waiting for two hours, and then she does call and you hang up and still have no idea where she is!”“It's safer that way,” Viktor said. “The garbage could be listening to the line.”“Do not lecture me!” Nikoi shouted, though marginally less loud. “Get your dog under control and bring her here before my men handle it!”“You wouldn't need us if your men could handle it,” Alexander shot back. “There's a protocol, Nikoi. We will bring her in once the heat dies down. I'll call you when we've got her.”“Idiots!”4Nikoi is still an asshole. Nikoi shouted, but at nobody in particur, and in this context his turning around and storming outside was as good a degree of acceptance and agreement as the Ignatyevs were likely to get out of the new king.

  Viktor tactfully waited for Nikoi to sm the door closed behind him before he spoke up.

  “You know she wouldn't act in haste like this on her own,” he said to Alexander, who kept shaking his head. “It has to be the cop.”“Of course it's the cop,” Alexander said, “the warehouse was his fault, too. But that doesn't help us right now. Are you sure he's still alive?”“He had better be,” Viktor said. “He jumped into the water with her. She would have brought it up if anything had happened to him.”“She would have,” Alexander said, reassuring himself. “Okay. Okay, we're not done yet. Ilya's out of the way, Anne knows how to lie low, we can still decide how to handle the cop. We can make this work.”Viktor paused and sucked in a shallow breath, as if taking a drag from a cigarette and letting the tar settle into his lungs. “It sounds like you want to hand her over to Nikoi,” he said.“No,” Alexander said. “No, of course — definitely not. We'll find a way, Viktor. We will. But right now we need to have her here, not out there where she could…get into more trouble.” The boy looked up, meeting Viktor's eyes, even the ones tattooed on his eyelids when he blinked. “Find her first,” Alexander ordered. “Start with Dolr.”“Yes, boss,” Viktor said.“Be thorough,” Alexander added.“…yes, boss,” Viktor said.

  Anne's house in Port Richmond, Staten Isnd, was about her age. It was cd in baby blue vinyl siding, a little bit taller (at two floors plus attic) than it was wide, and the only thing that could even conceivably make it stand out was that it had a built-in garage at the ground floor. Walking up to it calmed her down. It signaled that, however briefly, she was not a criminal, but just a woman going about her life.

  “Janey!” a voice called from behind. “Janey, is that you? Hello!”

  Anne groaned and tried to push the pain deep down inside her, out of her face and her stance. Time to become Pin Jane. Unshouldering the pstic sack, she turned around to lock eyes with Patricia Jackson, both of their expressions making way for an awkward smile in almost perfect sync. Patricia was the next-door neighbor one would pick from the catalog after careful but not excessive deliberation. They went to church together on Sundays, helped each other with odd jobs around their houses and occasionally met on the bus.

  “Hi, Pattie!” Anne said, almost squeaking as she wrenched her voice higher to feign excitement. “I didn't see you there. The weather’s really clearing up today, ain't it?”5Instead of boring you with long descriptions of how Anne alters her body nguage and vocal qualities to assume the role of Pin Jane, I’ll just have her use contractions and less formal nguage.“Oh, it really is!” Patricia said, responding to the conversational thrust with the expected parry. Patricia ran her hands down her sides, smoothing out her sweater and the skirt she was wearing on top of her leggings. “You — ” she began, trying to be helpful and come up with an innocuous expnation for Anne's clothes and the sack. Tried and failed, so she ughed briefly. “What are you doing, Janey?”Anne ughed with her, even if it hurt. Laughing papered over many strange things. “You would not believe me,” she said, still ughing, stopping only when she noticed Patricia's smile slip. Anne had no good expnation for any of this. But Patricia knew her. Well, she knew Pin Jane. So there was a bad expnation she would believe and Anne hoped she knew what it was. “I'll say this much,” Anne said, “I'll never forget the parking brake again in my life, that’s for sure.”“Oh dear,” Patricia said. “Oh my gosh, Janey, what happened?”Hook, line and sinker. “You see, Pattie, I was at my uncle’s cabin out Phoenicia way,” Anne said. “Stopped my car in his driveway, right next to a little forest brook. But I didn’t put the brake on.”“Oh,” Patricia said.“It was just my own darned fault,” Anne said. “Who forgets a parking brake? So all it took was just one little bump and off she went, rolled back down the driveway real slow like, straight into the water. It was right out of a cartoon. I was so stunned, Pattie, I could barely even move!” Anne managed to raise her arm enough to mimic the action, pying off the pained wince as shock over her car's purported misadventures. “And to top it all off, she wouldn’t start again! By the time we towed her out with the truck winch, the whole trunk was its own little swamp. Phew!” She tapped the sack with her foot. “You're looking at what I didn't just throw away. And my uncle's finest leisure suit, on loan. My car's in the shop, so I took the bus.”“Oh, you,” Patricia said, moving in for a hug. Anne let it happen and swallowed a grunt when an elbow lightly touched her bruised ribs. “That is some rotten luck, Janey.”“Ain't it just,” Anne said. “Now if you don't mind, Pattie, I should be getting this inside and wash it out some more, see if I can't save some of it.”“Oh, of course, of course,” Patricia said, stepping back. “You do have a tumble dryer, don't you, Janey? You can use mine if you need to, it's no trouble.”“Thank you kindly, Pattie, but I wouldn't wanna be a bother,” Anne said. “I should just wash it all and hang it up.”“Oh, of course,” Patricia said. “But if it's too much, you just come over and put the rest in mine.”“Definitely,” Anne said. “And thank you again for the offer.”“Oh, it's no trouble at all,” Patricia said. “It’s no trouble at all, Janey, I'd really love to help you any way I can.”“I appre —” Anne began, only to be cut off.“In fact, why don’t we have you over for dinner,” Patricia said, “it's the least I can do to help you.” She paused briefly. “I do worry about you, Janey, sometimes. Living all alone as you do, with nobody to take care of you.”“It has its ups and downs,” Anne said. It was getting harder to keep up the fake smiles. “Now see, Pattie, I really oughta —““Oh!” Patricia said. “Oh, of course, do you need me to help you carry —““I've got it,” Anne said, slinging the bag back over her shoulder.“That's good,” Patricia said.

  Anne managed to get three steps away.

  “So, Janey?” Patricia called. “Janey? Dinner? I was thinking, maybe six, after Andy does his homework?”

  Anne grimaced at her. She had never been stabbed by white-hot needles, but once upon a time she had woken up the night after a fight that had seen her hurt her knuckles from an ill-aimed punch against a man's forehead. She had hovered for hours on the edge of toughing it out until the morning or throwing on clothes and driving across town to wake up Dolr. This felt a lot like that, except it was still getting worse.

  “I'll call you,” Anne lied. She fished her keys from the mesh pocket of the borrowed pants and hurried into her house.

  The bag fell to the ground right next to where Anne kept her shoes on a neat little straw mat. This was no time to worry about the clothes or tracking snow mush into the house. Anne stomped the direct route toward the stairs and did her best to hurry upwards, wincing every time she had to raise her left leg and compress her chest on that side. The upside was that her right arm seemed to be back in business, which kept her steady on the handrail as she ascended. In these critical seconds, Anne had plenty of time to rethink her policy of keeping all potentially incriminating items hidden on the second floor — good for keeping away nosy neighbors over for dinner, bad for getting to the emergency stash in a pinch. Which, well, if this was not a pinch, what else was?

  In the bedroom. Under the bed, too. Bend down and crawl and stretch her arm to get it. Anne wanted to give her past self a piece of her mind. But Anne never got what she really wanted.

  Wooden box in stiff hands, she sat on the bed and opened it up, taking what she needed from the generous assortment of medical supplies: adhesive bandage and cotton ball, a sealed disposable syringe, a pack of alcohol swabs and a small gss ampule, containing — according to the bel — 10 ml of a 2% solution of lidocaine.6A 2% solution in saline. I am told 1% is more commonly used in surgery, while 2% is used for dentistry to minimize the amount of liquid the dentist needs to inject and thereby reduce patient discomfort. Having been on the receiving end of quite a few of those injections, I certainly appreciate that!Also, it is common to mix in epinephrine, which serves to constrict blood vessels around the injection site. It keeps the local anesthesia, well, local, prolongs the effect, reduces bleeding for surgical incisions — and in a pinch, you’ll know if you’re injecting into a blood vessel if the heart rate shoots up. That’s helpful to know because injecting lidocaine directly into the blood stream is bad. As in, ‘potentially kill you dead’ bad. That said, lidocaine can be injected without epi. This used to be done when injecting into fingers and toes, as there were concerns that the epinephrine could restrict blood supply and lead to what’s called a digital ischemia, i.e. ck of blood supply to that digit. That’s also bad, as in ‘potentially lose a finger’ bad. My understanding is that this is no longer as common since some studies purport to show that the use of lidocaine with epi in these cases does not significantly impact the risk of complications. But my understanding may be poor as usual, so let’s leave these kinds of decisions to the professionals, yeah?On a side note: Digital Ischemia is the name of my Synthcore band. Am I doing this dank meme right, fellow kids? Anne dumped the jacket and pulled up her shirt, inspecting herself in the mirror hanging on one of her closet doors. Yep, that sure looked like an angry bruise spreading out over the left side of her chest. Anne felt for the hurting rib with a few gentle touches — even those drew pained hisses from her. Alcohol swab to wipe down the site, check. Unwrap syringe, check. Deep breath, check. Remove needle cap, check. Inspect needle for damage against the light, check.7You don’t want to get stuck by a needle with burrs. Trust me.

  Her hands were getting shakier, and every shake bumped into her side and this wasn't rocket science, get it together already! Cap needle again. Take a moment to pretend you're not going to stab yourself with it, right into the part of your body that hurts the most. Wrap something around the ampule.8Having had a test tube shatter in my hand during high school chemistry and then getting rushed to get an X-Ray for possible embedded gss splinters, I was shocked to hear that doctors and nurses don’t seem too concerned about breaking open gss ampules in their hands. Consider this precaution my anxiety tax. Anne's eyes darted across the rather small box, trying to find that fabled something. Screw it, just use the adhesive bandage! Her breaths sped up as she tried to wrap the long strip of material around the ampule and also not to crush it and also maybe not drop it on the floor because she could not bend down. Having wrapped the ampule accordingly, Anne looked at both of her hands, one holding the syringe, the other the ampule, and — long story short, she bit into the back of the plunger and gently pulled the syringe body off it. Hey, one-way syringe, and the needle was still sterile, right? Right. Breathing past the plunger held between her teeth, she put the empty syringe body over the hollow gss cap on the ampule. As carefully as anyone sweating from the pain in her side could manage, she bent the ampule's head to the side.

  Crack.

  Snapped off, almost clean, no shards, just the head now removed and sitting in the otherwise empty syringe body. For the first time since opening the box, Anne felt like maybe she was doing this right. That bit of positivity got her past dumping the ampule head onto the bed and even covered for coordinating her right hand and her mouth into reinserting the plunger. She was moving too fast, but she wasn't sure how long she could hold the now completely open ampule in her left hand steady without spilling it. She didn't even think about using her teeth again to pull the needle cap off, she just did it, too quickly to be horrified by the possibilities.9I guess we’re coming full circle on the topic of 2% lidocaine and dentistry uses thereof.Don’t handle Sharps while distracted, people.

  Ready to draw, check.

  She put the needle into the ampule until it hit the liquid, then worked the plunger backward to drain it. 10 milliliters, 10 cc. Anne wasn’t in the mood to worry about precise dosages. She squinted her eyes as she freed the syringe. She pushed the plunger back, squirting some saline onto her bed.10Squirting a bit of liquid before injection should be done ideally with the syringe pointed upwards and lightly tapped beforehand to get the air bubbles out. Air bubbles that get injected into arteries can be quite dangerous, but this is a far lesser concern for injections into veins or tissue. You’d still want to get the air out, though, to make sure that it’s not messing up your measurements. Of course, neither arterial injection nor being very particur with her measurements apply to Anne’s use case here, but darn it, she’s seen Dolr do it so she does it, too. If I hadn’t looked this up I would’ve done the same, thanks to TV and movies. Cargo cult medicine at its best. Dump the empty ampule next to the snapped-off head, try to remember not to sleep on broken gss — if you ever sleep in this bed again.

  More breaths. Out of time. Just — just do it already.

  There were three distinct phases of pain Anne went through when she injected herself with the lidocaine. First was the needle going through the skin and barely any meat to cushion the puncture, all the way down to the bone, and that hurt. Then she had to pull out the plunger a bit to make sure she hadn't stabbed into a blood vessel11This is called aspirating, by the way, a verb which is also used for describing the process of sucking stuff into the lungs — whether fresh air (good) or half-digested street food (not good).Also I realize now that I could have footnoted that way back in Chapter 4. But I think you picked it up from context. I believe in you., and she could have done without that her life. Then she pushed the lidocaine, and that? That burned like hellfire. Anne pulled her next few breaths through clenched teeth as the burn slowly turned to numbness, and when she eased the needle out, she barely felt anything around the site. What she saw, though, was a droplet of blood seeping from the injection site — not a major puncture, but controlble with a cotton ball and pressure while pulling out. Okay. That was going wrong, but if that was what was going to go wrong here, she was fine with it. Plenty of worse things to go wrong, after all, and the sudden ease with which she managed to recap the syringe and put it aside and even bend over to get more supplies from the box was absolutely worth it. Using the cotton ball, she wiped up the trickle of blood and pressed down on the puncture site — well, the pale red little pustule that had built up around the puncture site. She took a few experimental, deep breaths.

  Better.

  Anne set her sights on the wall closet. Opening it brought a glimpse of Pin Jane to the right and not quite another world to the left. Those heavy winter clothes, long coats and even the dark gray coverall she ultimately pulled out were all still within the realm of the expinable. She had tried it out with Patricia. Don’t you know, Pattie, she had said, that this is just practical for working around the house, especially cleaning the roof and sides. Wearing the coverall while doing just that might not have convinced Patricia this was indeed the best outfit for the job, but it had pnted in her the idea that Pin Jane believed so and therefore owned the coverall for this exact reason and no other, less justifiable one. And the long coat? Just good sense in this weather.

  The safe set into the wall behind the closet was Anne’s final stop. It wasn’t a big safe, maybe a cubic foot interior space if one bothered to measure, so it didn’t offer quite the same choices as her armory at the safehouse. On its top shelf was a spare Colt pistol of no particur significance, which Anne didn’t need in any event, as well as a holster and four loaded spare magazines, which she did. In lieu of a table, it all went onto the bed. What was left of the cash she had on hand was on the shelf below; it went onto the bed as well. At the bottom of the safe was the directory of her lies. Every boring bit of paperwork in false names, every bank account carefully fed and tended by pusible, legit-looking income appropriate to her Pin Jane life, every document confirming her to be who she wasn’t. She closed the safe without touching those lies. They were useless for what she was going to do and she couldn’t chance her enemies getting their hands on them, whatever the circumstances, so they wouldn’t leave this house until it was to be abandoned forever. But Anne was not at that point yet. The day could still be won.

  At least this is what she told herself.

  Anne got to changing clothes. The pain in her side wasn’t gone, not nearly, but she could move through it and that had to be good enough. All geared up, she buttoned the coat over her clothes and whirled around in front of a mirror. She thought she looked suspicious, dressed like she was, but then again she knew what she was looking for. It’d pass muster with people not looking too closely, she reasoned. The st weapon to load would be her money clip. She sorted through the bills: some from days past, plenty still from her share of the deal with Sebastian Reid, and some from the day before yesterday. She blinked at that; could that be right? Had it only been two days, all in all? The pain in her side stung her still. She was about two thirds through the st bundle of bills when the devil told her to stop and look. So, she stopped and she looked. And when she thought she saw what the devil had wanted her to see, she went looking in Reid’s payment as well.

  “Curious,” she said.